This Never Happened

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A Canadian documentary will be playing at the Vogue in Fernie on October 21st – the documentary is called That Never Happened: Canada’s First National Internment Operations.

The documentary exposes the WWI Canadian internment camps that interred thousands of Ukrainians across Canada from 1914-1920. One such camp was in Fernie BC from 1915-1918. The Canadian government destroyed all records of the internees in the 1950’s and have only acknowledged the camps in the past decade.

That Never Happened reveals the story of Canada’s first national internment operations between 1914-1920, when over 88,000 people were forced to register and more than 8,500 were wrongfully imprisoned in internment camps across Canada, not for anything they had done but because of where they came from. In 1954, the public records were destroyed, and in the 1980s a few brave men and women began working to reclaim this chapter in history and ensure future generations would know about it.

The director Ryan Boyko will be in attendance for a Q&A after the film. He is a multi-award winning Visual Artist and an accomplished Actor who has performed on many of Canada’s finest stages including The National Arts Centre in Ottawa, two seasons with the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival and two seasons at The Stratford Festival of Canada, where he won the Tyrone Guthrie Award.

The multi-city release beginning in late October will cover National Internment Commemoration Day on October 28th and culminate on November 11th at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. This year, November 11th will be the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day – the day that WWI ended – now commonly referred to as Remembrance Day. The filmmakers and IndieCan Entertainment are excited to share this largely unknown story from WWI and to honour the sacrifices of both the Veterans and Internees of the Great War. Tickets will be free for Veterans on November 11th.

The Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations specially selected the film to be screened during the September 2018 Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva as part of its celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. After the screening, director Ryan Boyko and producer Diana Cofini were joined for a special Q&A with Rosemary McCarney, Canadian Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN, and Georgette Gagnon, Director of Field Operations and Technical Cooperation for the UN Human Rights Office. The screening was attended by delegates from around the world including Ukrainian Ambassador Yurii Klymenko.